


green finch and linnet bird (how is it you sing?)

by meganbloomfield



Series: TLC Shipweeks 2020 [1]
Category: Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Levana Blackburn is a Terrible Person, The Author Regrets Nothing, no beta we die like aimery "worst human to ever live" park, this is so late i'm sorry!!, tlc shipweeks 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:20:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25901206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meganbloomfield/pseuds/meganbloomfield
Summary: Lunars, Winter had decided, didn’t understand that there were things more beautiful than a baseless glamour. Though Winter had no proof that Levana’s beautiful face wasn’t the one she was born with, she had heard hushed whispers, stories that may as well have been fairy tales, of an ugly princess with scarred cheeks and a wicked elder sister. The storytellers, the ones spreading these legends, were always found dead before Winter could think to ask any questions.But Winter dreamed of snow-capped mountaintops, of fields so green they hurt her eyes, of laying on white sand in front of a real ocean and immersing herself in water so blue it put the sky to shame. In every one of these fantasies, Jacin was there- and when she actually dreamed, in the literal sense, of these scenarios, Selene would disappear and reappear, scattered throughout her dreams like ash, quite frequently. But Jacin was a constant, awake and asleep, quietly lurking beneath her more important thoughts and fears during the day, and the co-star of the fearless fantasies enacted in her mind at night.
Relationships: Jacin Clay/Winter Hayle-Blackburn
Series: TLC Shipweeks 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1879678
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	green finch and linnet bird (how is it you sing?)

**Author's Note:**

> marissa meyer: [severely underfeeds the jacinter stans]  
> me, prepared to do the dirty work: fine, i’ll do it myself
> 
> LMAO yeah this is hella late and I haven’t written a fic for these two in like a year but GOD do I love these guys, the lunar chronicles is probably my favorite book series ever and I love writing for it. I promise when I do Kaider, I won’t be late. (I’m also planning a winlet one-shot… stay tuned fuckers!)
> 
> shoutout to @kaiderforever on tumblr for finally inspiring us to get our shit together and putting this event together. Hopefully next year we’re more prepared lol. If you guys wanna scream about tlc with me I’m @hayleblackburn and i’m also on discord as john mulaney will defeat thanos!#7537 so gimme a shout over there!
> 
> and for taryn, who complains routinely about the lack of jacinter love in the fandom (you’re SO right) HERE BITCH EAT <3

  
  


_“Green finch and linnet bird, nightingale, blackbird,_

_How is it you sing?_

_How can you jubilate, sitting in cages, never taking wing?_ _  
_ _Outside, the sky waits- beckoning, beckoning-_

_Just beyond the bars._

_How can you remain, staring at the rain, maddened by the stars?_

_How is it you sing anything?”_

**_-Stephen Sondheim, ‘Green Finch and Linnet Bird’_ **

  
  


_prelude._

* * *

Winter was optimistic, but she wasn’t an optimist. In Levana’s court, that was a privilege that couldn’t be granted to you no matter what your status- not that ‘princess with no blood relation to the crown and an adamant refusal to manipulate innocents’ was a particularly high position, regardless. Winter would dream of another world, one where she could be an artist, or a baker, or a seamstress, like her mother. 

At fifteen, she would drift off imagining that she would wake up somewhere else. She would be twenty-something, in a nice little apartment somewhere down on Earth. _(She’d heard stories of places like Paris, a city of love, or Los Angeles, a city of dreams. Places too far away to think of during the daytime, dreams too dangerous to speak aloud.)_ Levana had looked down upon these Earthen places for years. Manhattan was one- chaotic, and helpless, Levana had described it. Everybody doing as they wished, not acting under anyone’s orders, everyone doing something different at once.

To Winter, it sounded very much like freedom.

In these dreams, maybe she’d be living with Jacin, maybe not, but either way they would see each other every day. They would go to markets and sample delicious food and Jacin could be a doctor. Winter could take photographs, paint portraits of beautiful things. 

_(Lunars, she’d decided, didn’t understand that there were things more beautiful than a baseless glamour. Though Winter had no proof that Levana’s beautiful face wasn’t the one she was born with, she had heard hushed whispers, stories that may as well have been fairy tales, of an ugly princess with scarred cheeks and a wicked elder sister. The storytellers, the ones spreading these legends, were always found dead before Winter could think to ask any questions.)_

But Winter dreamed of snow-capped mountaintops, of fields so green they hurt her eyes, of laying on white sand in front of a real ocean and immersing herself in water so blue it put the sky to shame. In every one of these fantasies, Jacin was there- and when she actually _dreamed,_ in the literal sense, of these scenarios, Selene would disappear and reappear, scattered throughout her dreams like ash, quite frequently. But Jacin was a constant, awake and asleep, quietly lurking beneath her more important thoughts and fears during the day, and the co-star of the fearless fantasies enacted in her mind at night.

Before she would lull herself to sleep with these fantasies, she used to scare herself to sleep by imagining Levana creeping down the corridor every night and entering her chambers, silently. Winter imagined that if Levana discovered Winter was awake, she would kill her, but if Winter was asleep, Levana would spare her. Winter convinced herself that every soft tap was Levana’s silk slippers on the marble floor, every squeak was the sound of her door opening, every grunt was a guard being killed by the queen. With this, she would hold perfectly still until she fell asleep. Needless to say, this made her more terrified of the wicked queen than she already was. She found a new way to pass the time until she fell asleep.

She never truly believed in these things coming to life, but when her manic episodes and hallucinations propelled her fifty kilometers in the air like lava from a volcano, (another thing she wished to witness) these dreams provided her with a soft place to land. And maybe, someday, after Levana was preoccupied with an heir and busy taking over Earth, she and Jacin could escape, unnoticed, and live a quieter, less picturesque, less safe version of the Levana-less daydreams that kept her sane. 

She didn’t believe it would ever happen, but she always thought it would be so fantastical if Libertas, Roman Goddess of freedom and liberty, would take pity on her, and set her free from the chains she’d been attached to at birth. Maybe one night she would fall asleep in her uselessly large bed in the palace and awaken in one of the cities she’d heard Levana badmouthing. 

Impossible, of course. But that was what made it a dream.

  
  


* * *

_21 december 125._

Winter had never known silence, not since childhood.

Between the gut-wrenching cries of her stepmother as she’d clutched her dead husband, stuck forever echoing in Winter’s head, ringing in her ears, and the never-ceasing screams of those put to death in the throne room, there was no such thing as quiet in the palace. And when there was, it was never anything other than a red flag. 

This was one of those deadly times.

The tension that creeped throughout the palace halls alongside Winter was just as palpable in reality as her hallucinations were horrific in fiction. Winter hadn’t seen Levana all day, hadn’t heard her ice-cold voice echoing through the halls, hadn’t been summoned into the throne room to watch another innocent citizen she pretended not to know kill himself.

It terrified her.

The reason for the silence, Winter suspected, was what would have been Selene’s sixteenth birthday. A day of mourning throughout the country. In past years, Levana had gone on with the trials scheduled- always crimes committed by arsonists and those who had committed treason in particular. Always some of the most horrifying deaths. While Winter couldn’t remember much of Selene- _(she’d held one precious memory of her in her heart, of Selene’s loud, throaty laugh. At the age of three, giggling at a jester, Selene sounded like a lifelong smoker, coughing her way through her amusement)_ Winter couldn’t imagine that she’d want her birthday commemorated by horrific, merciless deaths enacted on the floor in front of the very throne she had once been owed.

Today, Levana had taken the day to reflect in her bedchambers. In all of her sixteen-nearly seventeen- years of life, of knowing the queen, Winter had never, _ever_ encountered a tame, absent Levana- let alone on a day such as this.

As her guard accompanied her back to her bedchambers after she’d pretended to fail her bioelectricity lessons, Winter resolved to try and get away with staying in there for the rest of the day. When the queen was occupied with something unpleasant, something that caused a deadly silence throughout the castle, it meant that the first person to run into her would be the poor fool to feel her wrath. If Winter could fake illness and remain safe in her bedchambers where she couldn’t encounter the angry queen, it not only gave her more time to finish reading the second-era story she’d been gifted by a tutor, it meant she might even have some more time to daydream, staring out the window and allowing her imagination run wild.

Winter’s guard held the door open for her as Winter stepped inside, curtsying politely. She froze as the silence was broken.

“Your highness!”

Winter slowly turned her head to meet the eyes of thaumaturge Aimery Park. His ever-present horrifyingly smug smile dancing on his lips, Aimery crossed the hall towards Winter. He nodded at her guard, still meeting her eyes.

“I’ll take it from here, sir Campbell. Her Majesty the Queen has requested the presence of Princess Winter this afternoon,” Aimery said, his expression unreadable. Winter felt herself begin to panic.

“May I ask what for, sir Park?” Winter asked in the most calm and polite voice she could muster. Aimery’s smile didn’t waver.

“It’s best you just come with me, your Highness,” he said. Winter nodded, biting down on her lip, and began to follow him down the corridor.

Before long, they approached the throne room and Winter’s panic level began to rise even higher. She wondered if she would fake a panic attack or have a real one. Before she could gather herself, the heavy doors swung open and Winter stood facing Queen Levana, who was on the balcony, posture rigid, staring into the vast darkness of the lake below.

Aimery cleared his throat and Levana turned to face him, surveying the two of them standing at the doors. Her eyes lingered on Winter, and Winter knew Levana was eyeing the scars she’d given her stepdaughter.

“Ah, Winter. Thank you, Aimery, you may go.” Aimery bowed out of the room, shutting the doors behind him.

Levana turned to face the lake once more. “Did sir Park tell you why I had summoned you, Winter?”

Winter swallowed the bile filling her mouth. “No, my queen.”

“Come here,” Levana beckoned her. Winter felt frozen to the spot, but her feet carried her to the balcony, standing her next to her stepmother. Despite her own refusal to use her bioelectricity, Winter knew Levana would never give up her gift, even for a small task such as this. Winter was rarely this close to Levana anymore, and with both of them in a pair of simple flats (another rarity) she noted that she was an inch or so taller than her stepmother.

“Do you see that, Winter?”  
  


Winter stopped looking at the top of Levana’s head and followed her gaze, realizing that the queen wasn’t staring at the lake at all, but the shore in front of it. With a gasp, Winter caught a glimpse of a corpse, bloody and broken, being carried away by two guards on a stretcher that looked to be about two sizes too small. Winter couldn’t see the body well enough to tell if it was a man or a woman, but knew by the color of the uniform that the body had belonged to a rather high-ranked member of the court. Levana cleared her throat and Winter remembered, with a jolt, that she was there.

“The body?” Winter choked out. 

“Yes, Winter. The body. It belonged to a man named Quincy Fowlerton. He died this morning.” Levana explained monotonously.

“Why-”  
  
“Quincy Fowlerton was very talented with his gift. He was on the path to be promoted to thaumaturge. But then, about four and a half years ago, he lost control of his gift, claiming he’d lost the ability to use it entirely.”

So this was why the queen wanted to speak with her. Winter tried to imagine Jacin’s voice in her ear, reminding her to breathe. Of all the bloody days for him to have to accompany Sybil Mira to her mystery satellite, it _had_ to be today. Winter tried to distract herself by thinking of how Jacin once said he suspected there was someone living in Sybil’s satellite- Winter was nearly jealous. She wondered how nice it might be to float around forever, safe in her own space. Not like she’d be any less free than she already was here. Levana’s honeysap-sweet voice broke through Winter’s inner monologue.

“He went mad,” Levana went on, in the same manner one would announce that they were leaving to use the washroom. “He began to see things that weren’t there, claimed to be prophesizing the end of the world- rather, the end of the Blackburn reign.”

Winter was silent.

“I don’t take kindly to people attempting to disrupt the dynasty,” Levana continued, now eyeing Winter from out of the corner of her eye. “What became of sir Fowlerton is certainly a shame. His madness, that is- I’d hate to lose someone so talented with their gift as he was. As I am. As you are. Or, should I say, as you _were_.”

Winter’s blood turned to ice.

“How long has it been since you lost control of your gift, Winter?”

Winter spoke in barely a whisper. “About four and a half years ago, my queen.”

“I would advise you to push yourself a bit harder in your studies. Madness is not a commodity, Winter. Nor is it attractive. Then again- I suppose you don’t care much for your own attractiveness. At least, that’s what those scars tell me,” Levana quipped cruelly, barely attempting to hide the not-so-tiny smirk that spread over her face. Winter silenced a gasp, doing her best to catch her breath. Levana continued to stare at the now-empty shore, as the guards had carried the body away. 

After a few long moments of silence, Winter spoke up. “My queen, may I ask a question?”   
  
“If you do so quickly. I am growing tired, and it was always going to be a difficult day,” the queen replied, turning and moving from her spot on the balcony to sit on her throne. Winter followed her onto the dais and stood beneath her throne.

“Did- did sir Folwerton jump?” Winter asked, hoping she didn’t sound suspicious. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, per se- but asking questions wasn’t exactly encouraged.

Levana turned to face her, her large brown eyes boring into Winter’s. “Whatever do you mean, princess?”  
  
“You- you said he died. You didn’t say… how.”

Not a single muscle in Levana’s face moved. “Why would you concern yourself with something so dreary, Winter?”

“I’m not sure. Curiosity got the better of me, I suppose. Forget I asked anyway. I’ll leave you now.” She curtseyed and approached the door, nearly reaching the handle when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Winter cringed, so small that she barely even noticed it.

“I should hope sometime in the next year, your gift makes itself apparent once more,” Levana said from behind her. Winter turned and met her icy gaze once more. “I should hate for you to meet a fate like Sir Fowlerton’s.”

Winter struggled to push her hammering heart out of her throat. “Yes, my queen. I hope for the same result.”

And with that she was gone.

Winter had turned the corner and scurried down the corridor into the empty atrium before she let out the sob that had been building inside of her chest. Curling in on herself, she dropped to the floor and buried her hands in her hair, pulling at her curls and crying into her forearms.

She was crying so hard, in fact, she hardly noticed the blood dripping off of her hands and onto her skirt.

_Of bloody course, like this wretched day couldn’t get any worse._ she thought to herself as she tried to stiffen her body and control her thoughts. Jacin’s voice echoed in her head once more, this time reminding her that the hallucinations were not there, could not hurt her, and oh _stars_ what she would do to hear his voice right now.

From her lips to God’s ears, Jacin appeared at her side less than a second later. 

For a moment, Winter refused to believe it was even him- she could never be lucky enough to simply _summon_ him like that. Perhaps this was an adjacent, very cruel chapter of her hallucination. 

But then his arms were around her waist in a way that felt more solid than any manic hallucinations or frivolous daydreams ever could be. 

When she fell under the influence of her madness, reality snapped in a way she couldn’t understand at all. The world as she knew it-and she barely did understand it at all- became wonky with confusion, chaos rising like a blossom in bloom. 

But under a doorway in the atrium that evening, with servants pretending not to notice her or hear her gut-wrenching sobs, she began to feel, in the middle of her hysteria, her fear and pain, she realized in that moment that so long as Jacin was alive and with her, nothing would be able to _truly_ scar her.

The three scars running down her face were proof that no physical mark could ever matter to her- no physical proof of her distress would ever appear and upset her. 

Jacin’s voice bringing her back down to earth, Winter collapsed into his arms, chest heaving. 

“Are you alright, Win- Princess?” He picked her up, steadying her on her feet.  
  
“The walls,” she said lamely, pulling her eyes across his face to be sure he was real, and he was her Jacin.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner. I heard you crying…” He trailed off. Surely the whole of the palace had heard her as well.

“It’s all right, it’s fine. Thank you for being here n-now,” she hiccuped. Her breath steadied, and her gaze dropped from Jacin’s eyes to his lips, briefly, and then to the floor. “Would you mind escorting me back to my chambers, Sir Clay?” Winter asked.

“It would be my honour,” he replied.

  
  


_December 13, 129_

* * *

Winter teased her fingers through her thick curls, standing sideways in front of the mirror. “Jacin, are you nearly ready?” She called. Her voice echoed through the rather empty hotel room. Jacin didn’t answer, but rather emerged from the adjacent bathroom, scowling. Winter caught a glimpse of him in the mirror and failed to stifle a laugh.

“I look ridiculous,” Jacin said. 

And he did. He was wearing plaid swim trunks that appeared to be a size too big and a long-sleeved wetsuit shirt that nearly reached his knees.

“Why are you wearing the wetsuit?” Winter gasped through a bout of laughter.

“I’m covering up. It’s going to be freezing.”

“Don’t be silly, Jacin. It’s not going to be that cold.”

“It’s _December,_ " he scowled.

“It’s nearly summer here, anyway.” Winter quit fiddling with her hair and instead picked up her bag, sifting through it. “Stars, Whitehaven Beach. Did you know it’s been considered one of the most beautiful beaches in the world since the second era?”

“I did know that,” Jacin replied, pulling on his shoes. “You told me on the way here.”

  
“Right, of course. I’m sorry, I’m just so excited.” Pulling the bag into her shoulder, she turned to see Jacin in his ridiculous swim costume grabbing his own bag. 

“Don’t apologize. I know how long you’ve wanted this.” He kissed her quickly before the two of them headed out the door.

It was nearly midnight, and the sky was pitch-black- nevertheless, the sand was so white that the entire shore lit up like a beacon underneath the shining stars. Winter and Jacin set their bags down on the empty sand. Tentatively, Winter pulled off her cover-up, adjusted her swimsuit, and dipped a toe into the warm waters. She took a moment to feel her feet sink into the wet sand before running into the waters. From behind her, she heard Jacin peel off his swim shirt and follow. 

The two of them stood in the surf, waves splashing around them as the stars glittered above them, brighter than anything Winter had ever witnessed even so late at night. Winter felt Jacin’s arm slide across her waist under the water and she leaned into his side as he pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

Winter lifted her head from his shoulder and pressed a kiss to his jaw. Jacin’s lips met hers as they swayed in the water, waist deep, the smell of salt surrounding them and the night sky endless above them.

They broke apart, but Jacin held Winter close. “Is this what you wanted?” He murmured against her mouth.

“Yes,” she whispered back. “All I wanted was to see the world with you.” With that, she kissed him quickly and dove under the water, laughing. 

Jacin followed, swimming alongside her as deep as they were willing to go. She willed herself into opening her eyes and saw that Jacin had been watching her. She grinned and resurfaced. 

“You’re not supposed to open your eyes under the water!” Winter chastised, splashing him.

“You did it!” He replied with a laugh. The two of them dove underwater, eyes open once more. Winter wanted to see everything- wanted to capture each beautiful, brilliant moment in her memory forever, immortalize it, preserve it- and if she could perhaps send it to her younger, frightened self, so far away, through time and space and energy, just to convince herself to persevere, she would.

A free bird, flying through the sky, a fish in a vast, blue ocean, safe, free, endless.

Infinite.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> *finger guns*
> 
> title and lyrics from "Green Finch and Linnet Bird," a song from Stephen Sondheim's _Sweeney Todd _one of my favorite musicals (and movies!) ever. Johanna has Big Winter Energy. Definitely recommend the song, as well!__
> 
> _  
> _I don't own TLC or any Sondheim properties._  
>  _


End file.
